Voter turnout soared during the Jacksonian era, reaching about 80 percent of the adult white men by Indeed, race replaced property qualifications as the criterion for voting rights. American democracy had a decidedly racist orientation; a white majority limited the rights of black minorities. New Jersey explicitly restricted the right to vote to white men only. Connecticut passed a law in taking the right to vote away from free black men and restricting suffrage to white men only.
By the s, 80 percent of the white male population could vote in New York State elections; no other state had expanded suffrage so dramatically. The Supreme Court of North Carolina originally upheld the ability of free African Americans to vote before they were disenfranchised by the decision of the North Carolina Constitutional Convention of At the same time, convention delegates relaxed religious and property qualifications for whites.
The Dorr Rebellion in Rhode Island was an uprising of men who wanted to see greater, faster expansion of white male suffrage. Describe the circumstances surrounding the Dorr Rebellion and its effect on the Rhode Island constitution.
The Dorr Rebellion — was a short-lived, armed insurrection in the U. The Rebellion demonstrated that as average citizens became more involved in political issues, conflict was possible and did occur. The event can be viewed as symptomatic of an era in which citizens became more passionate about and partisan in their political beliefs.
At a time when most of the citizens of the colonies were farmers, this was considered fairly democratic. However, as the Industrial Revolution reached North America and people moved to cities, fewer people owned land. Those who wished to extend white male suffrage argued that the charter was un- republican and violated the U.
Before the s, there had been several attempts to approve a new state constitution that provided broader voting rights; however, all had failed. The charter lacked a procedure for amendment, and the Rhode Island General Assembly had consistently failed to liberalize the constitution by extending voting rights, enacting a bill of rights, or reapportioning the legislature.
By , Rhode Island was one of the few states without universal suffrage for white men. In , suffrage supporters led by politician and reformer Thomas Wilson Dorr gave up on attempts to change the system from within.
In early , both groups organized elections of their own, leading in April to the selections of both Dorr and Samuel Ward King as Governors of Rhode Island. King showed no signs of introducing the new constitution, and when matters came to a head, he declared martial law. President John Tyler sent an observer but decided not to send soldiers. Nevertheless, Tyler, citing the U. Most of the state militiamen were Irishmen and newly enfranchised by the referendum, and consequently supported Dorr.
At the time, these men owned the Bernon Mill Village in Woonsocket. The Charterites fortified a house in preparation for an attack, but it never came, and the Dorr Rebellion soon fell apart. The Charterites, finally convinced of the strength of the suffrage cause, called another convention. In September of , a session of the Rhode Island General Assembly met in Newport and framed a new state constitution, which was ratified by the old, limited electorate and proclaimed by Governor King on January 23, The new constitution greatly liberalized voting requirements by extending suffrage to any free man, regardless of race, who could pay a poll tax of one dollar.
It was accepted by both parties and took effect in May of In Luther v. Borden , the Supreme Court of the United States sidestepped the question of which state government was legitimate, finding it to be a political question best left to the other branches of the federal government. Dorr returned to Rhode Island later in , was found guilty of treason against the state, and was sentenced in to solitary confinement and hard labor for life.
The harshness of the sentence was widely condemned, and in , Dorr, who had fallen ill, was released. His civil rights were restored in In , the court judgment against him was set aside; he died later that year. Privacy Policy. Skip to main content.
Democracy in America: — Search for:. The Jackson Administration. Key Takeaways Key Points Jacksonian democracy was built on the principles of expanded suffrage, Manifest Destiny, patronage, strict constructionism, and laissez-faire economics.
A failed assassination attempt on Jackson led many to believe that he was blessed by the same providence that protected the young nation he governed, which in turn fueled the American desire to expand during the s. Key Terms Jacksonian Democracy : The political movement toward greater democracy for the common man typified by the American politician Andrew Jackson and his supporters.
Petticoat Affair : A U. Nullification Crisis : A sectional crisis during the presidency of Andrew Jackson created by a South Carolina ordinance. Jackson and the Democratic Party The modern Democratic Party arose in the s out of factions from the largely disbanded Democratic-Republican Party. Learning Objectives Describe the key moments in the development of the Democratic Party. Democrats in Congress passed the hugely controversial Compromise of , giving them small but permanent advantages over the Whig Party, which finally collapsed in From to , banking and tariffs were the central domestic policy issues for Democrats who favored movements such as the war in Mexico and the expulsion of eastern American Indian tribes.
Key Terms Jacksonian Democracy : The political movement toward greater democracy for the common man typified by American politician Andrew Jackson and his supporters. Era of Good Feelings : A period in the political history of the United States associated with President Monroe that reflected a sense of national purpose and a desire for unity among Americans in the aftermath of the War of and the Napoleonic Wars.
Whig Party : A political group of the United States during the era of Jacksonian democracy considered integral to the Second Party System and operating from the early s to the mids; the group was formed in opposition to the policies of President Andrew Jackson. Learning Objectives Describe the creation of the spoils system and its eventual reform. In response to these events, William L. Key Terms political machine : A local organization that controls a large number of personal votes and can therefore exert government influence.
Nullification The Tariff of highlighted economic conflicts of interest between the Northern and Southern states that eventually led to the Nullification Crisis of John C. In November of , a South Carolina state convention declared that the tariffs of both and were unconstitutional and unenforceable in the state as of February 1, In late February of , Congress passed both a Force Bill and a newly negotiated tariff.
The crisis is considered one of the first direct causes of the Civil War. Key Terms Tariff of : A protective tax in the United States that aimed to reduce taxes and thereby remedy the conflict created by the Tariff of The Indian Removal Act was signed into law by President Andrew Jackson in June of , and resulted in the Trail of Tears, a forced displacement that claimed the lives of thousands of American Indians.
By , 46, American Indians from southeastern states had been removed from their homelands, leaving 25 million acres of land for white settlement and the expansion of slavery. The Trail of Tears : A name given to the forced relocation and movement of American Indian nations from southeastern parts of the United States following the Indian Removal Act of Learning Objectives Summarize the key commitments of Jacksonian Democracy.
Key Takeaways Key Points When the country was founded, only white men with real property land or sufficient wealth for taxation were permitted to vote in most states. During the Jacksonian era, suffrage was extended to nearly all white male adult citizens. The fact that white men were now legally allowed to vote did not necessarily mean they routinely would, and political parties worked to pull voters to the polls.
Expanded voting rights did not extend to women, American Indians, or African Americans. Key Terms Disenfranchisement : Revocation of, or failure to grant the right to vote, to a person or group of people. Jacksonian Democracy : The political movement toward greater democracy for the common man typified by the American politician Andrew Jackson. The Dorr Rebellion The Dorr Rebellion in Rhode Island was an uprising of men who wanted to see greater, faster expansion of white male suffrage.
Learning Objectives Describe the circumstances surrounding the Dorr Rebellion and its effect on the Rhode Island constitution. The Dorr Rebellion demonstrated that as average citizens became more involved in political issues, conflict was possible and did occur. The rebellion started when two different state constitutions were approved and two different governors were elected in the same election. The Dorrites favored greater voting rights, while the Charterites preferred the original charter and restricted voting.
The Dorr Rebellion fell apart after an unsuccessful attack on the Providence arsenal in However, the event convinced the Charterites to frame a new state constitution that extended suffrage to any free man, regardless of race, who could pay a poll tax of one dollar.
Constitution, which outlines the duties states have to each other as well as those the federal government has to the states. Charterite : A resident of Rhode Island who supported the original state charter that limited suffrage to free white landowners. Licenses and Attributions.
Because the Americans were selling much cotton to the British, they built up claims in the form of bills of exchange, obligations of British cotton importers to pay American cotton producers. With the Chinese, because of their opium imports, now in need of a way to pay the British opium merchants, the Americans quickly realized that they no longer needed to carry silver to China to pay for imports of Chinese goods.
They could substitute bills of exchange drawn on British cotton importers for silver, and the Chinese would have a nearly ideal way to pay for their opium — the British opium merchants would receive in payment promises of their own countrymen to pay pounds sterling. The net result of this substitution was that Mexican silver swelled the US monetary base. In what is perhaps the most memorable sentence of his book, Temin wrote p. That could not be the whole story, Temin realized, because ceteris paribus the money-fueled inflation of prices in the United States should have corrected itself as Americans and foreigners bought less of American high-priced goods and more of cheaper foreign goods, leading to an outflow of specie from the US.
That did not happen in the s inflationary boom because British and other foreign investors were so attracted to the actual and prospective returns on US bonds, stocks, and other assets that they transferred large amounts of capital to the United States. In essence, foreign investors were willing in the s to underwrite a US trade deficit and keep the American boom going well beyond the time it would have gone on without the capital transfers.
In this sense, the s US boom bore some similarity to that of the s. The s boom did come to an end in , at least temporarily, in a commercial crisis and banking panic that led to a nationwide suspension of the convertibility of bank money into base money specie in May of that year.
The suspension lasted for approximately a year, and by preventing many banks from closing their doors, as Temin noted Chapter 4 , it likely hastened the economic recovery later in the year and extending through and into What caused the banking panic and suspension of convertibility of ?
Many US historians since that era have pointed to two policies of the Jackson administration. One was the Specie Circular of August, , requiring that land purchases from the federal government, which had soared to high levels during the boom, be paid for in specie rather than bank money, as had been customary before the Specie Circular went into effect.
The other was the distribution of a mounting federal surplus, after the national debt had been entirely paid off by , to the states in , as required in the Deposit Act of June The surplus-distribution legislation passed by Congress was not strictly a policy measure of Jackson, although his administration went along with and administered it. Proponents of the theory that one or possibly both of these measures was the trigger of the financial panic argued that they increased the demand for specie by the public and caused specie reserves of banks to be reallocated around the country in ways that increased the fragility of the banking system, leading to the panic of May Continuing on his revisionist bent, Temin examined the two measures and found them wanting as causes of the panic, mostly on grounds that amounts of specie required for land purchases and the movements of specie required to distribute the federal surplus to the states starting on January 1, , were too small to have caused the panic.
Rousseau shows that the Specie Circular did not end the land-purchase boom, as Temin supposed, so it therefore most likely did promote a drain of specie from eastern banks to accommodate continued frontier land purchases from the federal government after August Even more important, according to Rousseau, preliminary transfers of federal balances among banks in various regions of the country during the last half of , made to prepare for the surplus distributions of , had the same effect.
Be that as it may, having rejected the Specie Circular and surplus distribution as causes of the panic, Temin needed another explanation. He found it in the money-tightening policies of the Bank of England, commencing in mid, in response to its declining gold reserves. Tight money in England soon became tight money in the United States, given the extensive commerce between the two countries, and it also caused a drop in the price of cotton by early The drop in cotton prices threatened the solvency of commercial firms on both sides of the Atlantic, and when they began to fail in , the banks that had lent to them were also threatened, leading to runs on their reserves and the suspension of convertibility in the United States.
In the penultimate chapter of the book, before the summary and conclusions, Temin discusses the recovery from the panic of , the crisis of , and the long depression that followed. The treatment is more cursory than the previous discussion of events through , but the story is much the same.
According to Temin, in response to a loss of reserves, the Bank of England doubled its discount rate from mid to late , cotton prices fell, and the flow of capital from Britain to America declined even more and for a longer period than it did during and after the panic. In addition, understanding them will be of great value in isolating the effects of marketization and economic developments outside the purview of these mammoth events, as it regards to the eradication of slavery in the American Republic.
The Inflationary Boom of was generally considered to be a result of mismanaged policies throughout the administration of President Andrew Jackson, but over the course of time, alternate theories have developed as well. However, economists in the tradition of Temin would argue that this boom did not have its roots in the Bank Wars, which involved massive disputes at the highest levels of governmental power about centralization and control of the American banking system.
These economists would argue that this inflation was a result of mismanaged monetary policy, monetary reserve limits and regulations, and changing proportions of control of the currency base by the public. No matter what the cause, the souring inflation rates did not help to prepare the nation for the Panic of , which saw a commercial banking panic and economic crisis.
Two Jackson policies are often suspect for this crisis, the mass sale of public lands that now were required to be be purchased in specie , or base currency gold, silver , and the distribution of a federal currency surplus into the general population. Alternatively, Temin and company argued that the tightening of monetary policy at the Bank of England in was to blame for the panic.
This constricted monetary policy triggered a consistent trend in the United States, which is observable in a noticeable decline in cotton prices.
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